An Italian cybersecurity firm was hacked on a grand scale late on Sunday evening.
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Reports have revealed that nearly 400 gigabytes of company information was fished out.
The software is sold to governments and law enforcement agencies, though the company has not revealed a full list of its clients.
“The company’s “Remote Control System”, called DaVinci, is able, it says, to break encryption on emails, files and internet telephony protocols”. The hackers group 1st published the data that was stone, email messages, internal files and Twitter account of the Hacking Team. Take our quiz.
One tweet by the hackers that is written as if it were posted by Hacking Team reads: “Since we have nothing to hide, we’re publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code, followed by a link”.
Company officials were unavailable for comment and its webpage was inaccessible.
The information from the beach confirmed long-standing accusations which until now was only supported by circumstantial evidence: Hacking Team was selling surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes around the world, many of which have records of human rights abuses.
“There doesn’t seem to be any sort of human rights due diligence in what we’ve seen right now”, said Collin Anderson, an independent researcher who has knowledge of the commercial surveillance market.
Recommended: Passcode How well do you know hacker movies? For the next several hours, it sent out screenshots of emails and documents implicating Hacking Team in all sorts of questionable behavior.
That kind of data, if accurate, could be immensely damaging to Hacking Team, which has sought to defend its operations amid a variety of accusations from critics over who buys its software and how it’s used. According to The Wall Street Journal, an industry veteran estimated the total value of surveillance tech marketing at $5 billion a year in 2011. “The attackers are spreading a lot of lies about our company that is simply not true”. “We are working with the police at the moment”, he wrote, but the tweets were subsequently deleted, as was his account.
This company is a digital arms dealer with zero qualms about selling to customers that have proven track records of using its software to violate citizens’ privacy.
Confirmation of the breach came via the Twitter account of Hacking Team engineer Christian Pozzi.
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Hacking Team also works with law enforcement and national security organisations to either conduct hacking, or to protect themselves from it.
